Singular sensation

ONE may have expected a travelling portrait exhibition to originate from the National Portrait Gallery, but this one comes from the NPG's next-door neighbour.

ONE may have expected a travelling portrait exhibition to originate from the National Portrait Gallery, but this one, elegantly presented in four rooms at the University of Queensland Art Museum and covering the period 1880 to 1960, comes from the NPG's next-door neighbour, the National Gallery of Australia.

The quality and range of the paintings testifies to the wealth of portraits within the field of Australian art, even though they have been painted in this continent for only a little more than 200 years.

There were, of course, no portraits in traditional Aboriginal art. The first depictions of individual Aborigines belong to the early years of colonisation in Sydney town, and they are yet another symbol of the irreversible changes that would be wrought by European contact on a culture that had subsisted virtually unchanged and unchanging for thousands of years.

Portraiture not only requires the technical ability to render an individual likeness but, even more fundamentally, presupposes a conception of individual identity that is quite foreign to tribal cultures in general and Aboriginal culture in particular: for these people, as anthropologists have put it, the first person pronoun is plural rather than singular, and the sense of identity is totemic in the sense that one is oneself by virtue of the connection one has with an ancestral being who is imagined as still present.

Time, therefore, is cyclical rather than linear; there is no idea of historical development or individual agency within a linear unfolding of events. Nothing can change -- except through external intervention -- when there is no conception of the possibility of change.

In the West, portraiture and the corresponding ideas of the individual and of historical evolution have a very long although complex history. In modern times, two of the great literary models for the conception of the self have been Michel de Montaigne, who justified his self-analysis on the basis that his experience was common to all men, and two centuries later Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who prefaced his autobiography with the claim that he was unique.

These two ideas -- that the individual's experience is common and that it is unique -- are two poles of the thinking behind the modern portrait, the relative balance evolving as figures are presented increasingly in the guise of singular individuals unsupported by a social role. Broadly speaking, throughout the present exhibition, we witness the increasing fragility of the self when the individual is left on his own, from the late 19th-century pictures with their alternation of self-inspection and theatrical display to the increasing angst manifested in the images of the war and post-war years.

One of the first portraits in Face, although dating from the later 19th century, has be understood in the context of late romanticism, and specifically in the light of the German transformation of Rousseau's ideas and the immensely influential picture of the modern individual and his intimate relation to nature in Goethe's youthful novel The Sufferings of Young Werther, first published a century or so earlier.

Bernard Hall, later director of the National Gallery School in Melbourne, was a student in Germany at the time, and he paints himself in a subdued monochrome palette of greys, greens and browns, in the dappled shade of a bower. The catalogue rather misleadingly suggests he is presenting himself as a country squire on his estate, but if we look closely it is clear he is dressed in city clothes and shoes and is standing in a garden, not the countryside. The emphasis is not on ownership or prestige but on a kind of intimacy with natural life.

Hall's painting of his friend J. Montgomery makes a telling contrast with the self-portrait in almost every way, except in the nervous, introspective personality of the sitter with his oddly faraway gaze. The picture is small but exquisitely painted in a rich and subtle palette, from the soft pink of the wall to the yellow striped waistcoat and pale blue socks. The two paintings are among the most interesting in the exhibition and suggest Hall could be an excellent candidate for a smaller monographic exhibition.

Other outstanding pictures from the earlier years include Robert Dowling's enigmatic portrait Miss Robertson of Colac -- a beautiful young woman who remained unmarried because her father considered no suitor worthy of her -- recently included in the Dowling retrospective. Significantly, perhaps, the portrait was originally painted with a white dress and later almost completely repainted at the model's request, with the present dark dress and a garden table set with an elaborate oriental tea service.

There are also several paintings by Hugh Ramsay, including the beautiful portrait of Nellie Patterson, niece of the great Nellie Melba, which displays his affinity with John Singer Sargent. Dressed all in white and perched rather warily on a large pink cushion, the little girl stares into the distance, her expression suggesting at once a touch of gravity beyond her years and a certain anxiety about slipping off her precarious seat.

Particularly striking is a portrait sketch of Lena Brasch by Tom Roberts, discovered in the 70s behind a painting for which the young woman modelled. The picture is executed with great boldness and directness, always intended as a study rather than an exhibition work. The face is full of sensitivity and life even as it turns away with downcast eyes. The lower part of the torso is unfinished, the costume marked out in rough black lines, and the soft mushroomy underpainting flecked with dabs of paint applied with the square brush, like test patches from the palette for the complex mixtures that compose the skin, hair and upper parts of the girl's clothing.

Among other works by Roberts is Madame Hartl (c. 1909), the subject dressed in the costume she had worn to a fancy dress party at the Chelsea Arts Club earlier that year. She appears an attractive woman but far too ample in form for her role as Giovanna Tornabuoni, as we know her from the late quattrocento paintings by Ghirlandaio, including the frescos in Santa Maria Novella.

A much earlier work by Roberts, painted in Melbourne in the first years of the Heidelberg movement, is the anonymous portrait of a young woman called An Australian Native (1888), dressed in pink and black against an olive background. The title is curious, emphasising as it does the fact the subject was born in Australia (unlike Roberts, who came to this country as a boy). No doubt it is significant that the picture is dated to the centenary year of the first settlement. By this time, there must have been thousands or even tens of thousands of people of her age who could claim to be third or fourth-generation Australians. But the population had increased by several multiples since the gold rush and perhaps Roberts is thinking of a girl who is a first-generation native born to the new arrivals. There is a curious melancholy in her gaze that speaks of the pathos of being caught between two worlds: she is entirely European in dress and fashion, yet has never left Australia.

There are three pictures by E. Phillips Fox -- another painter yet to receive a monographic exhibition -- but they reveal a less confident and decisive artist than Ramsay or Roberts. The most remarkable work is the portrait of Mrs James Pirani, an old lady in black with a couple of gold chains discreetly suggesting her wealth and reminding us of those 17th-century Dutch portraits of wealthy widows.

Rupert Bunny's portrait of his wife Jeanne -- whom we have seen time and again in various states of undress in his big figure paintings -- is like a picture of an actress out of costume. She looks straight at us with very little expression, rather bored if anything and somewhat disabused. Nearby is a striking group portrait by George Lambert, Weighing the Fleece (1921), which is clearly conceived as something of a sequel to Roberts's Shearing the Rams (1890). But whereas Roberts emphasises the dignity of the men's labour in an apparently egalitarian environment, Lambert makes very plain the different economic and power relations between the owner and his wife, the manager and the workers. In the centre is the white fleece, the symbol of the wealth being generated on the grazier's property.

In contrast to this essay in social and historical documentation, but sharing the same tonal modernist style inspired by the rediscovery of Spanish painting, are two single-figure compositions by Violet Teague and Agnes Goodsir. Teague's The Boy with the Palette (1911), a portrait of Theo Scharf, a child prodigy painter who left for Munich in 1914, is her most memorable composition. Goodsir, who lived in Paris in a lesbian milieu that included the colourful Anglo-French Renee Vivien, is represented by a portrait of her lover Cherry, who appears in most of her best pictures, and here as The Parisienne (c. 1924) in the guise of a boyish flapper, hat pulled down low over her eyes.

Also a picture of a female companion, but devoid of erotic overtones, is Nora Heysen's London Breakfast (1935). Her friend Evie sits reading as she sips her tea, before a drop-side table set with a teapot, bottle of milk, loaf of bread and other still-life elements, while in the background a blue-and-white Chinese bowl on a stand and Dutch frame against the cream wall remind one of the artist's earliest pictures painted under the guidance of her father, Hans Heysen.

Max Meldrum's Poland (1917) is a dramatically colourful portrait of a Polish friend in bright national costume, while Napier Waller's Christian Waller with Baldur, Undine and Siren at Fairy Hills (1932) is a deceptively simple composition in which naturalism is combined with art-deco stylisation. Less well-known is Elise Blumann, whose portrait of her teenage son Charles emerging from the water at the beach consciously echoes the attitude of Botticelli's Birth of Venus.

Portraits become understandably more tortured, and the sense of self less secure, during and after World War II. Arthur Boyd's The Brown Room (1943) is a memorable image of the artistic but rather overwrought environment in which he grew up, with his father hunched in depression on the sofa and his wide-eyed brother David playing the piano.

There are two self-portraits by Albert Tucker. The first, in 1937, shows a self-conscious -- and clearly self-taught -- young painter scrutinising his image in the mirror; the second, in 1941, is an image of hysterical explosion. Even more disturbing is John Perceval's picture of a boy holding a wild cat (1943): the creature's claws are red and threaten to lacerate his face; he grimaces in terrified anticipation but there is no blood. It is like the moment at which one wakes from a nightmare.

Face: Australian Portraits 1880-1960
NGA touring exhibition
University of Queensland Art Museum until March 27; Darwin, April 9-July 10; then Warrnambool, Launceston, Gymea and Gladstone, ending April 2012.